Avoid Successful Hosting

Jun 27, 2008

Successful Hosting or "unsuccessful hosting" as we like to call it destroyed our clients website. He had a php based site that corresponded with a perl script to generate user id #'s. Successful Hosting transfered his website to a new server running hsphere and suddenly not only did the perl script cease to work, but the dynamic forms and the mod_rewrite stopped working as well.

We have been working on this issue for two weeks to fix everything that has been done and finally yesterday we had everything working. I was downloading the entire website for backup and at the same time, successfulhosting restored a corrupt version of the website, which is what I ended up downloading. The restore also deleted thousands of client files from his site because it overwrote folders that had files in them with folders that were empty.

On top of this it takes a week for them to complete a simple support ticket and you CANNOT get anyone other than a level one tech on the phone. And the only thing the level one tech can do is write down your complaints and send them to someone else.

We have had to move all of the clients data onto our server so we can start from scratch without interference from successful hosting.

I've been trying to track down Alex Brecher, who I understand sold Successful Hosting to Navisite some months ago, regarding a project I did for him that I'm still owed some funds on.

Unfortunately, I've not been able to contact him by any means. The telephone number I had for him rings with a busy signal, he doesn't answer e-mails on what seems to be his current e-mail address (it was last updated a couple months ago on Plaxo), etc. I even tried sending a fax (which I think got through), but no reply... And sending him a message on LinkedIn ended off with him seemingly deleting me from his contacts :-|

Anyhow, I'm not one to leap to assumptions, but I get the distinct impression perhaps he doesn't want to talk to me -- which seems relatively absurd to me considering it was a relatively small project in any event. So I thought maybe someone here who is more familiar with the situation involving Successful Hosting's sale may be able to help me out in finding him, or at least give me a bit more insight :-)

i would just like to vocalise my utter disbelief at how incompetent and dishonest Absolute Design Barnsley aka Smart Merchant aka Absolutewebdesign.co.uk have been.

Our company signed up just over a year ago to their Absolute Design Smart Merchant shopping cart website system.

To overview, this is a pay-monthly service where they host the site and we add products to the CMS style website that Absolute Design have produced.

Being a small family business we opted for this kind of pay monthly service as it would (we hoped) give us some level of support from Absolute Design Barnsley to help with the running of the site.

At first they were helpful at getting the site setup initially but months down the line and after phonecalls or online chats with Absolute Design , the result has been no action being taken as requested.

Simple things like removing the option for other currencies... I phoned in August of 2008 and was asked to email the request to Absolute Design Barnsley , which i did. Did the other currencies get removed? Nope! I phoned and emailed many times.

This year due to the economic climate we have had many price changes to do, so i phoned Absolute Design Barnsley and asked for a holding page to be put up while i changed all the prices.

I was told this would be done within the hour.

I had my doubts that this would actually happen due to past experience, and indeed a WEEK later and the holding page STILL was not up.

During this week we had several people try and buy things at the old prices and we had to cancel orders. This is obviously frustrating for us and the customers.

Due to Absolute Design 's Smart Merchant poor system i since found out i was unable to 'turn off' the shop in any way except for basically deleting the entire payment gateway setup.

Products were also still viewable at old prices via google, even if i disabled them in the CMS itself. BAD Smart Merchant !

Also in this time i managed to decide and almost fully populate a new website for our shop, it seem's Absolute Design Barnsley cannot even produce a holding page in that same space of time.

Now, you may think why didnt i just leave? Well, after that week i rang up and asked to cancel, i was asked why and i CALMLY stated my reasons, which were basically poor support.

This resulted in Andy Clegg from Absolute Design Barnsley saying to email my request to leave and he slammed down the phone.

I emailed my request to change our Domain IPS tag and contact details and within a few minutes our website had been deleted BUT Absolute Design Barnsley decided to delete the IPSTAG for the domain, basically rendering the domain useless, including our email which we use on a daily basis.

I spoke Absolute Design again on the webchat (on a friday) and asked them to change the IPStag again, they said ok, but it probably wont get done till Monday.

I was obviously doubtful as it didnt take them long to delete the IPSTAG....

Monday comes and Absolute Design still haven't changed the IPSTAG. We are shut on mondays so i rang on Tuesday and spoke to Craig. He seemed more reasonable and said he would change it shortly. Several hours later and Absolute Design Barnsley still had'nt changed our IPSTAG and were still basically holding our domain hostage.

I ring up AGAIN, speak to craig, he says hold on for a moment, about a minute later they just hung up the phone again. I ring once more and noone answers...

Instead of swift switchover to the new site, Absolute Design Barnsley have forced us to take action with Nominet to recover our domain.

This just seems ridiculous, I'm guessing Absolute Design Barnsley must be losing alot of customers but to act the way they have is just childish.

What is the point of causing so much agro just because someone wants to cancel?

I thought I should share with everyone my terrible experience with 123-Reg's dedicated servers.

I'd had one of their Linux servers for about 2 years when it suddenly stopped responding. I emailed their support team (there is no telephone support for dedicated server customers for some reason) who responded saying that the hard drive had failed and that they'd assign a new server to our account and copy over the data (if still readable) asap.

After a few days they responded again to my original support ticket explaining that they were unable to assign a new server to my account and that I'd have to go through the order process again. I did this and waited for them to try and copy the data over; the only response to this was that they'd "request that a technician connect the old hard drive to the new server", and the support ticket status was updated to "solved", despite the fact that it clearly wasn't.

Days turned into weeks and not a single byte of data had been copied across. I opened yet another support ticket asking when they would do this, and this is the response I got:

"You will need to login as Administrator and copy files across. If you want us to copy certain files, we need to know what directories you want copied and there will be a charge of £100+VAT."

That's right, £117.50 for them to restore our data despite it being COMPLETELY THEIR FAULT that the server had gone offline. I could possibly understand the charge if somehow I'd managed to cause the hard drive failure but obviously this was not the case.

I seriously have no idea how they expect to be able to justify this charge.

So you might be thinking, "why not just login as administrator and copy it across yourself?" Good question - unfortunately they only give administrator or root access to customers who request it via their control panel, and those who do request root access subsequently forfeit any software updating/patching/configuration or technical support. In other words, I had to sacrifice all this if I wanted my data back, which was not an acceptable course of action for me as I am in no way a qualified server administrator.

One of the reasons I went with 123-Reg in the first place is that they promised from the outset to take care of all server maintenance for me.

As I'm typing this, the server (and consequently all sites on it) has been offline for over a month and I have come to the conclusion that 123 are utterly incompetent server providers. I'm going to cancel my account immediately and take my business elsewhere, and assure people that staying well away from this company will be the best decision you ever make.

i would avoid virpusnetworks.net as they do not issue refunds when they clearly state 14 days moneyback. They blantly ignore me for anything to do with refunding and also they messed up the hosting for me to begin with. Making me lose a few days waiting for them to set it up CORRECTLY they set it up but didn't include the correct password so i couldn't access it.

Anyway i still not got my money back and if i was you guys try find a different provider when it comes to peace of mind with money back.

i recommend these vps providers:

vpsland and solarvps both outstanding companys, hope to see more of them

We read a large number of reviews and ratings before deciding on whom to go with for our VPS. In particular, the good marks for helpful technical support by SLHost staff as recommended by various posters here led us to go with them.

We paid six months in advance on February 12.

Unfortunately, it has been a nightmare. A few days after we signed up and went through the arduous process of moving data and reconfiguring the sites after the move, which consumed a total of 24 hours or so in 7 days, all was well until we ran into what apparently is a network problem. It remains and has gotten worse. We'll be leaving as soon as we find a new VPS host.

Whether a victim of their own success (perhaps they're too busy to look into things for us) or that they were simply overrated, the tech support is somewhat terse and when it came to a real problem, we were completely ignored. The issue is that the sites are unreachable and incredibly slow for 10-30 minute stretches, beginning during US nighttime from 10 p.m. - 2 a.m. Pacific. After about a week and countless more emails sent and received between their tech support, it began happening during the daytimes too. Tech support insists that there is nothing they can do, but it is exclusively our sites that we can't contact, and that goes for our users as well. They have said unless we have our site's users (who aren't computer technically proficient people and are very confused when we try to give them instructions on how to run a traceroute) run traceroutes as well, they don't have enough evidence there is a problem. This, despite the fact that there is a large discussion about it with various users from around the globe reporting the problem alongside their location. I linked them to this, and they dismissed it.

I advised them I would be making a report of my extremely poor experience with their services on this website. They dismissed that too. They are either overwhelmed, or it is what it appears to be: they simply couldn't care less.

Double billed. They cannot keep their servers running. Over one week and still no customer support for vps and a hosting account. After a week they have begun to respond to the server down tickets but they do nothing. Not even reimage. Seems they just take your money and run. All information on the sites is gone. All number 1 search engine ranking gone.

If you enjoy talking to voicemail then this is the site for you.

Now I have to work things out with the credit card company.

Will fly to Singapore tomorrow to see if the company exists and to contact a law firm.

My experience with 98ways.com was not bad when I signed up but about 2 days later the service went down and now about 3 days in it is still down. So I emailed a few times their admin@98ways.com email address asking to cancel / refund but the email address bounced back to me. This was the email address my invoice came from. So I cancelled my paypal subscription and emailed the address my payment went to "ollie.szczypka@googlemail.com" figuring it was a business email address since they use it for payments.

What I was upset about is if this company wants to make a go then they have to be reputable... Email their customers if they are having problems, give refunds when necessary, etc... The initial month was only $1.50 but its the point of it all... And I could have sworn I read a notice about a 14 day money back guarantee.....

We have been in trouble with BTN network since the earth quake in Taiwan. Meanwhile we dont have direct connection with BTN, the upstreams in our datacenter have peering with them. When making traceroute, it shows data from servers to customers routed through BTN. But the staff in datacenter said they cannot do anything to prevent this

Probably should've backed up my files more often, but that is hard to do when in the process of developing multiple sites.

I'll start by telling you exactly what happened.

Yesterday, at approximately 5:45PM I had checked my email, to my dismay i found that my payment had bounced due to the fact that I had forgotten to update my billing info (I was using my temp credit card until my new one had arrived in the mail). When I logged in to paypal, i had found Leeware had canceled my subscription making it impossible for me to get a payment in. At this point i had contacted trying to resolve the situation ASAP. After a series of emails i had found out that they had destroyed my server, and all files that were on it, including multiple sites which i had spent the last 3 weeks working full time hours a week on.

Reading through the TOS I found many half truths and full lies. When I signed up I had read

Quote:

It is your responsibility to make sure you have the funds to cover your subscription and resolve any problems which result in funds not being available when they are due. You also agree that in some circumstances your original server will not be placed back online because it has been archived and will therefore, require the payment of a recovery fee of $25 to be restored.

Which I believed meant that my server would be archived and i would be able to pay the recovery fee if something like this was to occur. This however is obviously not the truth.

Quote:

Subsequent payments are due on the anniversary date of the month for that month's service.

Again, I was ready and willing to pay on the date stated above.

My advice to anybody thinking about going with leeware; don't. It's not worth the risk, unless you run a hobby site or something you wouldnt miss.

My company rents machines and hosts our sites world wide. Lately we've seen a nice deal from MyDediServer here on WHT and rented out a QuadCore at a nice price.

We hoped that the "you get what you pay for" don't happen here but we were WAY wrong.

We started this weeks discovering the server is down. No access, no pings no SSH.

As there is no remote boot option I open an urgent ticket to support asking them to reboot the machine immediatly. After 2 hours of "we are on it" replies I chatted with their support only to be told "Admins will reboot it soon".

All and all it took them 12 (!!!) hours to reboot my machine and to top that when I've asked why it was down at the first place they ignored my questions (I've asked via ticket, email and support chat - all 3 ignored me).

I did claim it's either a DC, Network or machine problem yet they claim it is not.Machine messages log is clean and no shutdown was issued.

Anyway Today (2 days after) I got a newspaper article made about my site ($$$) and when I came online to see traffic I was shocked to find out that the machine is down and off the grid yet again (!).

A support ticket was opened again two hours ago and a reboot is yet to be seen.

My feedback - keep clear - don't use them and avoid them even if they hand out free 8-core machines (!). They seem to be a one man (if at all) show with no to low customer orientation and a non-existing to low-existing support.

My guess is that they have a "chat operator" in India while the DC control does only US prime time support hence when I ask for a reboot it won't happen till the DC guys wake up in the US which sucks.

I try to avoid trash talk as I hate that but these guys are the worst I've ever used (and I rented out at dozens of companies).

I have a long list of good reasons why not to use HostPapa. My fist major problem with them was that a couple weeks after I started being hosted by them I was told by one of their tech guys that I was not allowed to host my site on their server. What a rude awakening considering my page is only a PHP web based game that using only a tiny bit of system resources. The idiots they hire there thought I was running a game server for first person shooter games even when I specifically told them that I was running a small PHP game I wrote myself and there was nothing in their EULA that disallowed me from running my site. At least their head admin haves half a brain and said everything was fine, but from there on every time I contacted support I was harassed about running a PHP program on their server which was very annoying. If you are planning on using PHP or having your site being anything about games at all, HostPapa is not for you.

My second problem was the page not working, being very slow, or outright completely down. The site seemed to go down for about an hour or two every other week. Then came a couple BIG downs. In one case last month my site was down for most of a day and night. That is 24 hours. If you like your site to have more uptime than a free host then HostPapa is not for you.

Yes, then came the third problem I had with them. First, they force you to commit to one year because they know you will leave the moment you notice their crappy service, but they do advertise a 99.9% guarantee on the front page of their site. So, I wrote to their forum asking politely asking for the reminder of my year as a refund. I was rudely told that 99.9% does not mean my site. Yea, they don't mean your site is up 99.9% of the time even though they imply this. They only consider something down when the server you are on goes completely and utterly dead. To make things worse, unlike most other providers they don't have any server status andywhere and they will not respond to you if you ask. So, there is no way for me to tell if he was telling the truth or not. If you want a web host provider that does not cheat and lie HostPapa is not for you.

if it was not bad enough that HostPapa bailed out on their %99.9 uptime guarantee they deleted my post asking them about it on their forum without notice. Then, when I made another post politely asking why, they deleted that post; once again, without giving any reason to me. If you want a host you can trust and listens HostPapa is not right for you.

Please, do yourself a huge favour. If you are ever looking for a web host provider avoid HostPapa like the plague. Also, make sure you spend several; hours checking up on a host and don't take their own forums seriously unless you see bad things about them.

If there is nothing bad written about them on their own forum, chances are, they are deleting all the bad stuff. And make sure to check neutral places like this, webhostingtalk.com, where people rate their own host. I have done all this now and found a short list of very good host.

i and some other people were scammed under Hetzner servers. Please avoid hetzner. I found out its not the first time they were used by Scammers, and im sure it wont be the last.

Maybe you have some nice memories with hetzner, well i cant deny that, but wait until you get into a messy situation, you will see the true color of this company.

When I smell something not right about Hannes, I immediately seeked their assistance to move in my data to their server. But Hetzner, didnt care.

Someone told me, in a similar incident few months ago, they were scammed by some guys selling Hetnser colo. This person contacted Hetzner and Hetzner didnt care.Its true. Hetzner didnt care. I contacted them so to get assistant to move my data into their servers. I told them I want to be their customer, but they simply told me to rent a server and move the data myself.

This is the true Hetzner!! It has been home of few or maybe dozens of Scammers. And time has proven itself, be careful of hetzner.

Some people will say, its not Hetzner's fault, but remember this its not the first time, hetzner's used by Scammers. In reality, if you keep a Scammer in your home and he scammed the society using ur name, in some countries, you can be liable too.

What Im saying is, avoid hetzner before you ended up in trouble, because then only you will see their true color. By then its too late.

Theres nothing much I can do now.. But you can... Avoid Hetzner.. But the choice is yours.

Avoid thinkhost.com, they've decided to promote their affiliate program by spamming competitors. We found this ticket wasting spacei n our helpdesk and should be a good indication of their ethics:Quote:

Hello,I'm Vladislav Davidzon, the Executive Director of ThinkHost, Inc - I'd like to invite you to join our high converting partner program.$100 commissions! 2nd tier cash - up to $65 per accountcomprehensive partner interface10 year cookie + IP + session trackingGreat range of creativesCoupons to give awayMonthly paymentsAmazing EPC rates - an industry leader!Solid company, established in 1999We offer unlimited domains, unlimited databases and much more. ThinkHost Inc, has been providing web hosting services to the world since 1999 - we're also a "green" host - powered by 100% renewable energy.We'd love to have you join our program! You can sign up/learn more here:[url].. or if you have any questions; I'd be very happy to address them!I look forward to hearing from you soon!Vladislav DavidzonExecutive DirectorThinkHost, Inc14525 SW Millikan Way #17760Beaverton, OR 97005-2343[url]

So I've had a VPS with Amerihost for a while. I found a better deal, here actually, for a real server. I migrated my accounts and submitted my cancellation to Amerihost.com on April 30th. My account was set to bill on the 11th of May, so I wanted to make sure I didn't bill again.

Here is the first cancel ticket:

April 28th: [SUPPORT #XRQ-191822]: Support Request

[url]

Appears to have been deleted.

Here is another ticket I submitted after the first was ignored:

April 30th: [BILLING #IBJ-172957]: 2nd Request: Cancel my account

I had a conversation with them on this one making it QUITE clear I wanted to cancel, immediately. 8 parts, all still in my GMail account.

US Networx (USNetHost.com), formerly IntegraHost.com (they changed their name so they wouldn't lose a ton of business IMO) is a terrible hosting company. I will tell you my experience:

I signed up my domain, as well as 2 clients, up with IntegraHost.com back in August 2006. Everything was fine until about October when our sites were down for over A WEEK!

Their site was down too and I could not find any contact information or get ahold of my host at all. A host should be reachable AT LEAST during business hours. Nothing. It's like they didn't exist. I quickly switched my 3 accounts over to HostGator.com, who is AWESOME BTW! Their site was finally back up after a couple weeks. I requested a pro-rated discount on all 3 accounts since we prepaid for a year, but they refused. I said "F*&$ you then" and forgot about them.

This past week an old client contacted me, asking if they could get some files from me.

Sadly, they were only hosted on the IntegraHost, so I just contacted IntegraHost about it, discovering that they changed their name, but have the same site design. They told me it would cost $50 to recover a backup. I said I shouldn't have to pay a cent since I prepaid for a year on all 3 accounts, and no apology and no compensation were ever offered for the downtime. They replied with "Well, some our of customers stayed with us despite the crash." I said they were stupid to leave their sites down that long and that it wasn't a sufficient reason for me to pay anything. They said, well if you won't pay, we won't do anything. So once again I said "F*&$ you then" and closed the chat window. I guess my customer and I are just F&$#'ed then.

I WARN ANYONE CONSIDERING INTEGRAHOST OR USNETHOST TO STAY AWAY FROM THEM. THEIR CUSTOMER SERVICE SUCKS AND THEIR UPTIME IS HORRIBLE. IF YOU ARE A CURRENT CUSTOMER, PLEASE LEAVE BEFORE YOU GO THROUGH WHAT I DID!

I've had Jatol as a host and a few years back, they were just about the best deal out there.

Recently, I've come to learn that they will simply let the sites go down.

They host a number of my sites which have been down for a couple of days now, no one can acces. In addition their helpdesk and main site remain down and support fails to even respond to emails. Whois listed phone is disconnected.

I can't even access cpanel to backup log files/copy stats before moving to another host.

I'm getting the impression they won't honor the remaining time on the account (prepaid for (1) year). This possible fraud?

I'm moving to a dedicated server for first time in my life and I have some questions that I want to share with you all.

I have run many scripts like joomla, vbulletin, etc, and I have found that when I install a module or template or when I upload images using this scripts, the permisions of this files are wrongly assigned as they belong to apache:apache instead of myuser:mygroup.

The problem is that as my new server is going to be fully managed, I am not going to have root access to chmod this files to the right myuser:mygroup and as a consecuence I'm going to be unable to dmove or delete them usinf my ftp or shh user acount.

Hope you can help me this this issue. I need to tell my hosting company what I want to do to avoid this way of working but I have no idea of how can this be solved

I have two domains that I recently "re-animated" and they are been used as spam relays. I get almost 2 connections per second, according to the exim log.

I use ConfigServer Security & Firewall http://www.configserver.com/cp/csf.html which can block IP's that exceed a number of SMTP connections per hour. But these are thousands of IPs and proxies. Is there anything else I can do?

Are there any aps or addons or anything like that for debian where u can set your monthly data quota and have it execute a command when it's reached? (like sudo shutdown -r now , this would stop all my progs from using bw as they don't auto reload)

Or some other method of keeping you from going into overage

Atm I'm trying to use up as much as possible but most of my activity occurs while I'm out of the house (wrong hours) and I"m scared to leave it running because my gigabit server could easily burn through the last 300gb in a hour or 2

For those looking for hosting. This is a "company" (rackhosts.co.uk ), or rather - a person to avoid. John Ellison.

If you search his name here on WHT you'll see negative reviews about his service. He used to run Jehosts.com. Well, he got me today.

On www.mambug.com we sell website templates. He purchased one, and as a good company we are - we sent him the email with the download information to the template. Unknowingly he had a history of bad reputation.

Immediately following his download he opened a dispute with Paypal. He refused to remove the dispute.

What gets me the most, is that after the dispute he continued to message me on MSN asking for help with editing the website...

This kid, is just one of those people you don't want to ever have to deal with or meet. So beware.